x, 400 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : 20 cm

The word "German" was being used by the Romans as early as the mid-first century B.C. to describe tribes in the eastern Rhine valley. Nearly two thousand years later, the richness and complexity of German history have faded beneath the long shadow of the country's darkest hour in World War II. Now, award-winning historian Steven Ozment gives us the fullest portrait possible in this sweeping, original, and provocative history of the German people, from antiquity to the present, holding a mirror up to an entire civilization - one that has been alternately Western Europe's most successful and most perilous

Includes bibliographical references and index

I: From first tribes to first empire : -- The barbarian complex : Roman-German relations in antiquity -- From Merovingians to Hohenstaufens : Germanic rule in the Middle Ages. -- II: The Holy Roman Empire of the German nation : -- Man and God : Germany in the Renaissance and Reformation -- Europe's stomping ground : Germany during the Thirty Years' War -- Enemy mine : absolutism and the rise of Prussia. -- III: Enlightenment, reaction, and a new age : -- Trojan horses : from the French to the German revolution -- Absolute spirit and absolute people : the intellectual torrents of the nineteenth century -- Revolutionary conservatism : the age of Bismarck. -- IV: Germany in the modern world : -- The last empire : from Wilhelmine to Weimar Germany -- The barbarian prince : the rise and fall of National Socialism -- The composite German : Germany since World War II

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